


Cellophane

by TenSpencerRiedPlease



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Falling Out of Love, Heavy Angst, I'm Sorry, M/M, No Plot/Plotless, Not A Fix-It, Past Relationship(s), Tony Angst, vague timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-18 02:34:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5894716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TenSpencerRiedPlease/pseuds/TenSpencerRiedPlease
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony should have known, should have known that the second he had considered opening up to someone new it was bound to go terribly, it always did. He’s only had a handful of relationships in his life and not one of them has ever gone well. </p>
<p>He used to joke with Rhodey that he must be made of cellophane because no one ever seemed to see him, even when they spent all their time staring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cellophane

The thing about hiding your emotions is that when you get really good at it people sort of assume you’re always fine, or worse, they assume you don’t actually have emotions at all. Steve’s done both and Tony doesn’t blame him, he knew he was hard to read when he didn’t want someone to know what he was thinking because he was genius at making people look elsewhere. With his personality is wasn’t hard to stare in wonder at the amazing things he could do with tech, his flashy lifestyle, his presents, whatever it was he chose to distract someone with. It was easy to get lost in all the bright lights and sounds, looking at everything but the self-destructive tendencies, the lack of sleep, the bad drinking habits, his inability to properly display emotion on any given day. All it took was one bright smile and a small distraction and everyone was looking in all the wrong directions and he was, mercifully, left in peace.

When he and Steve first met they hated each other. Steve was a stuck up asshole with a fucking chip on his shoulder that was a mile wide and he thought Tony was a loose cannon with an inability to do anything right. Funny thing was that he had always seen through Tony’s bullshit when they had met, he saw every distraction, caught every smile, called him on all his shit. It wasn’t until later that he just… started to ignore all that stuff to see what he wanted and Tony figured that must be a testament to his talent that Steve just sort of… stopped seeing stuff when Tony finally found the right distraction. He remembered the incident clearly because he’d been awake for three days and he had been on the verge of a panic attack. His latest project wasn’t going as planned and with the lack of sleep and food it had gotten to him more than it should have.

Steve had been, as usual, annoyed with him for something Tony didn’t bother to remember because in the early days everything he did was wrong to Steve.

_“Oh for fucks sakes Stark, can’t you anything right?” Steve snaps, glaring at Tony._

_He wasn’t sure what, exactly, made that particular statement his breaking point, just that he had had enough of this asshole pretty boy acting as if he was so much fucking better than him. “Apparently not,” he snaps back, “but hey, how the fuck am I supposed to do anything right when absolutely everything I do is wrong to you? I’m so fucking sorry that we can’t all be perfect All American Boys who Do Everything Right All The Time and Never Fuck Up. Some of us are only human so if you could just leave me the hell alone that would be appreciated,” he snarls. He had whirled around and turned back to his own designs, leaving Steve to whatever the hell he came there to do._

_With his attention elsewhere he didn’t notice Steve staring at him until he spoke sometime later. “Have you lost weight? And how long has it been since you last slept?” he asks and the fucker has the gall to sound like he actually cared too._

_“The hell does it matter to you? You hate me, why the hell should you care that I haven’t slept in three days? And I don’t know if I’ve lost weight. Probably. That’s what happens when you forget to eat,” he says without thinking. Fuck. Now Asshole McGee was going to use that against him the next time he inevitably screwed something up. Which was always because god forbid Steve Rogers acknowledge that people were human, not everyone had fucking transcended human mistakes like he had._

_That isn’t how Steve reacts though. Instead he asks if Tony was okay and that was it, that was always the trigger that sent him straight into a panic attack because something about people actually_ noticing _that things weren’t right with him sent him into a dead panic. Steve handles it well, Tony thinks, he doesn’t actually know because as per Tony Stark usual he was in another world when he had panic attacks. When he finally manages to pull himself out of it Steve is there and Tony remembers the look on his face. The confusion, the shock. It was like he had seen Tony for the first time, and the last time if Tony could help it, and everything had changed._

He had reacted much worse than Steve had and Steve had been some pissed when Tony tried to pay him to keep his mouth shut about the panic attacks. Everyone had a price though, even Steve Rogers, but it had turned out that money wasn’t the currency he dealt with and Tony was the master of finding people’s price tags. He’d be lying if he said he actually cared about Steve at first, and he knew how horrible that was, toying with someone’s emotions just because he didn’t want the wrong people to know about his anxiety issues. It would be bad for business and god knows he had enough behaviors that were bad for business. The act hadn’t lasted long though because Steve was far more open with someone he had categorized as actually human.

Rhodey had been some suspicious of Steve at first, of his motivations, of Tony’s own motivations. They hated each other less than a week before, Rhodey reasoned, how the hell had things taken a total turn around to dating? Granted it was like one date but that hadn’t made Rhodey any less worried or confused. More than once in those first few months he had asked Tony what he was hoping to achieve because he had, correctly, guessed that whatever happened between the two of them Tony didn’t want people to know about it. Pepper didn’t say anything at all, she simply watched and that was worse, Tony knew, because she was a master at reading between the lines. There was a reason she had always seen through his shit, why they had become good friends. She was like his rock because try as Rhodey might he was terrible at grounding Tony, he just sort of went along with stuff and made sure Tony didn’t get hurt along the way.

However false, weird, and suspicious building blocks his relationship with Steve had started on it didn’t take long for that to fade into… something. Tony didn’t like labels and not because he didn’t find them useful, they were incredibly useful, but because that meant commitment and he wasn’t much fond of committing to emotional bonds. Commitment meant pain because he’d inevitably fuck it all up and god knew Steve was far too good for his ass. It had turned out the nasty reaction Steve had had to Tony was mostly in reaction to his public image, which was admittedly shit, and the level of privilege that Tony had. Steve was very social justice oriented and nothing about him had looked immediately desirable.

He had felt kind of shitty when he had found out that half of Tony’s image was purposefully crafted by himself and the other half was just shit people made up. Tony had used the made up half to craft his own bit, people didn’t think the party boy was any good at business and even though literally every number on the books indicated that assumption was far more than wrong they underestimated him. It worked nicely for him if no one took him seriously because they either ended up pleasantly surprised and business went well or they were too stupid to realize Tony just took their company over until they signed everything. Pep was great at working the language into a bunch of pretty little euphemisms that wouldn’t indicate a takeover too and people didn’t tend to take her seriously either. That was a mistake that Tony was pretty happy people kept making.

Steve had been more than curious to see how that went but Tony had been pretty adamant that he stay out of the public eye at least at first. He knew how well relationships and media went over and Steve, he didn’t deserve the backlash he would get for dating Tony. Plus if everyone knew about it that meant it was real and he much preferred things on a more casual, less permanent scale.

And then Bucky happened.

They had been close, Steve and Tony, or at least as close as Tony would allow them to get when god damn Binky came back from the dead. He knew about Steve’s best childhood friend, of fucking course he did, it was so _god damn clear_ that Steve was still at least partially hung up on him and that hurt. Later Rhodey would say that was probably why Tony kept one foot out the door the whole time they dated, because Steve still had one foot in the past.

He shouldn’t have been pissed off about it; he knew he shouldn’t because he’d drop everything if Rhodey needed help too. But he couldn’t help feeling like he was about to get left behind and abandoned for better prospects.

As it turned out Bucky Barnes was not better prospects. The guy had died, or so everyone had thought, but he had actually been found by a few hikers and taken to a local hospital. Except Barnes had no I.D on him and he had suffered from an amnesia from the accident so for years no one knew who the fuck he was, including Barnes. Then some other shit happened, Tony stopped listening because quite frankly it was easier, and Bucky got some memories back and hunted Steve down. Of fucking course he did.

Tony should have known, should have known that the second he had considered opening up to someone new it was bound to go terribly, it always did. He’s only had a handful of relationships in his life and not one of them has ever gone well. He wasn’t stupid, he knew at least part of that was his own fault for never being so closed off in all the most important ways but no one else seemed to ever look past what he wanted them to see so it was their fault too. It wasn’t hard, he thought, to see him for what he was but people were so distracted by his brightness that they never seemed to see the dark that always threatened to overtake it. He used to joke with Rhodey that he must be made of cellophane because no one ever seemed to see him, even when they spent all their time staring, but eventually he got too sore about the topic to joke about it.

It would be a lie if he said he didn’t know which one of them stopped talking to other so frequently because it was him. He pulled away because he knew that it was only a matter of time before Steve did it anyway so he might as well make the process less painful by doing it first. The method was shitty at best and only served to send him on a downward spiral that put a true test to his talents because not even Pepper and Rhodey noticed this one. Steve asked if he was okay and he held it together, said he was fine, flashed a bright smile, and resolved to never speak to him again.

Things didn’t work out quite that way, Steve was determined to stay friends and Tony was determined to _not_. So he did what he did best and went executed a pretty flawless Clean Slate Protocol, only with people instead of machines. The fact that Steve had so easily believed Tony’s easy smile, light eye roll, and insistence that their relationship had never really meant much anyways only proved Tony’s theory that Steve never really saw him. He only ever seemed to see what he wanted to. First there was Tony Stark the Huge Asshole, which wasn’t totally wrong, he was an absolute asshole but he was pretty shameless about that. Then there was Tony Stark the Broken Man Who Needs to be Fixed. Only Tony wasn’t code, he couldn’t just be rewritten and even if he could he wasn’t sure he wanted to be.

He was fucked up, he knew, but it served him well and he didn’t care that he was alone anyways. He had always been pretty alone even when he was in a room full of people and he had long ago made peace with that. It was his god damn birthday party that screwed it all up for him, he had managed to keep his alcoholism to himself, and that was not as easy as it sounded, but then he got reckless. _Really_ reckless.

As per usual it ended in disaster and Rhodey calling him on his shit because of course it would be Rhodey. Pepper was probably working on a way to spin it in the media because the two always seemed to have his back even when he didn’t deserve it. He tries to pull away from them too but neither of them let him and somehow Pepper manages to take all his alcohol, even the stashes he had around the house. He’d ask JARVIS if he helped her find them but the AI had long ago figured out how to lie so he didn’t bother.

Rhodey sticks around, of course he would, because he seemed to know Tony needed him and Pepper took care of SI like she always did. She needed a raise for dealing with his bullshit. He recovers slowly at first, he wasn’t much fond of emotional connection after being spurned for a dead guy, but he eventually gets over himself and lets Rhodey help. Why he put up with Tony he had no idea and one night he gets brave enough to ask. Rhodey tells him that when they first met, back in college, he had watched Tony for months before they had officially met, it was hard not to when he drew so much attention. He had picked up on the patterns pretty fast, Rhodey was no fool, and like Pepper he realized quickly that the whole damn thing was a show and it had stuck a cord with him. He figured someone who needed to spend that much time hiding everything about himself needed a friend and when they had met Rhodey took the opportunity.

Tony remembered that too, that Rhodey never seemed to expect anything, never pushed him, never questioned things that didn’t quite match up until Tony opened up to him one day. He had, naturally, regretted it right after, figuring Rhodey was bound to pass the knowledge on to someone else but it hadn’t. For months Tony had remained emotionally distant and Rhodey let him work through his shit and eventually he had come back when he thought it was safe. Eventually they got closer and Rhodey started calling him on some things and going along with others, judging pretty accurately which things he could talk Tony in and out of. Pepper didn’t bother with the pretenses, she just cut to the chase and Tony had appreciated her no-nonsense attitude because it was fucking refreshing to find someone who didn’t play games. Even _he_ played games and while Pepper knew how to play she preferred to move the board instead of the pieces. She was absolutely brilliant.

It didn’t explain why they stuck around exactly, because frankly all he did was make their life more complicated than it needed to be, but they both insisted that they both benefitted greatly from the friendship. Falling under his protection, they argued, was one hell of a perk and when someone insulted either of them he was there calling bullshit before the other person had a chance to finish. He was loyal, they said, and fiercely protective once someone got past that wall he built around himself. They both told him he was a deeply caring person, which didn’t much match up with the ‘Heartless Tony Stark’ image but they pointed out that no one who didn’t feel would go to such lengths not to.

They understood him in ways that most people, no, _all_ people seemed not to. So he wasn’t in a romantic relationship, he didn’t need one, never really had. Maybe he was a little broken, distant, but the people who mattered understood that and worked with it rather than against it. He recovers slowly and learns that ‘alone’ is a subjective term because he wasn’t alone, not if he didn’t want to be.                                                           


End file.
